ChatGPTTL;DR
- "AI estimating software" on a vendor page means one of three things: auto-count and auto-measure from a PDF plan set, roof measurement from a satellite image, or a chat window over the drawings. Every price here was read on the vendor's own page on November 1, 2026 unless the date says otherwise.
- Plan-set takeoff with AI runs $100 to $299 per user a month billed yearly: Kreo Pro $175, Togal Growth $299, Quotr Lite $69 equivalent, STACK Premium $299. PlanSwift Core is $3,000 a year a seat and Trimble Estimation MEP Pro is $1,950.
- For a roofer, the AI that matters reads the satellite image, not a plan set. RoofMammoth, our own tool, is $48 to $90 a month; Roofr's reports were $13 to $19 each when we read them in September.
- Claude Pro at $17 to $20 a month reads a 100-page plan set with its images and drafts a scope and a proposal. Anthropic's own docs say its object counts are approximate, so it does not do the takeoff.
- Only one vendor states a sample behind its claim. Trimble's August 2026 post covers more than 4,000 US contractors: 97 percent of scales auto-set, 60 percent less counting time, and "AI does not complete or finalize any part of the process."
- Skip per-seat AI takeoff if a plan set lands on your desk four times a year. The free STACK tier, the 14-day PlanSwift trial and a $20 chatbot cover that volume.
Most contractors searching for AI estimating software are not estimators. They are owners who got a plan set for the first time in a while, or who watched a takeoff eat a Saturday, and want to know if the thing that writes emails can also count receptacles. The answer splits by which step of the estimate you mean, and the vendors do not make that easy, because "AI" sits on the pricing page of a $20 chatbot, a $3,000 takeoff seat and a $25,000 done-for-you service alike. We priced eleven of them from the vendor pages on November 1, 2026, read what Anthropic and OpenAI say their models can and cannot do with a drawing, and sorted it by the kind of company you run. One disclosure up front: RoofMammoth, the satellite measurement tool in the roofing section, is ours. We say so again where it appears. If you want a free website audit before you spend a dollar on estimating software, the estimate queue is usually the real bottleneck, and that is the part we work on.
What "AI estimating" means on a vendor page
An estimate has five steps: the plan set or the address, the quantities, the priced estimate, the proposal, and the signed job. No tool on this list does all five, and the word AI attaches to a different step depending on who is selling. The chart below is the whole post in one picture.
The first class is plan-set takeoff. Togal, Kreo, Beam AI, Drawer, Quotr and the AI tiers inside STACK, PlanSwift, Trimble and eTakeoff all read a PDF and try to count the symbols and measure the rooms so a person does not click each one. Togal's FAQ puts the division of labor plainly: "the estimator still classifies items, reviews the takeoff, and makes the pricing calls." Its features page ends the job with "export your quantities out of Togal and into your own estimation software or excel spreadsheet." That is the honest scope of the category. The AI counts. You still price.
The second class never sees a plan. RoofMammoth and Roofr start from a street address and measure the roof from imagery, which is why roofers have a separate answer and a separate section below. The third class is the chatbot. Claude and ChatGPT read the spec book, summarize the scope, draft the RFI and write the proposal, and Bluebeam now sells a $590 tier whose AI is a connection to Claude rather than an auto-count. Where that class stops is the subject of the Claude section.
11 AI takeoff and estimating tools, priced
Every figure is the vendor's own page on November 1, 2026 unless the row says otherwise. "Per user" means per seat; several of these are billed only once a year, and the monthly figure is the vendor's division, not an option you can buy.
| Tool | What the AI does | Price as printed | Trial and term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Togal.AI | Auto-detect, measure and count from PDF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF; chat over the plan set; quantities export, no pricing | Growth $299 per user a month, billed yearly; Business custom at 4+ users | "Try Now" leads to a demo booking; no trial length printed; cancel by contacting them before renewal |
| Kreo | Auto Measure 3.0 on rooms, walls, doors, windows; auto symbol count; Caddie agent; live-linked cost estimates | Essential $100 (no AI), Pro $175, Business $250 per user a month, billed annually ($1,200, $2,100, $15,000 a year); Business is 5 seats minimum | 7-day trial; paid one-month Pro pilot credited if you go annual within 14 days |
| Beam AI | Self-serve AI takeoff for HVAC, plumbing and steel; done-for-you takeoffs for every trade in 24 to 72 hours | Do It Yourself "starts at $8K annual license per trade"; Done For You starts at $25K a year; aerial from $10K | No trial printed; demo only |
| Drawer AI | Electrical only: symbol and tag detection, panel schedules, branch routing, wire sizing, priced takeoff | No price printed; Starter and Enterprise both "Contact Sales" | 30-day money-back guarantee, free onboarding |
| PlanSwift | Auto Count, Auto Scale, Auto Bookmark on Essential; Auto Takeoff first pass on Core | Essential $2,000 a year a seat; Core $3,000 a year a seat | 14-day trial of Core with no card; annual only |
| STACK | AI Takeoffs, symbol search, GPT chat over the project on Premium; BNI cost library and proposals on Pro | Free tier; Premium $299 and Pro $349 per user a month, billed annually | Free tier includes 7 days of Pro, then 1 project and 50 measurements a month; paid plans are 12-month terms |
| Trimble Estimation MEP Pro | AI 2D takeoff, auto scale, auto count; Trade Service and Luckins material pricing and labor | $1,950 per user a year, US only; Accubid Anywhere and LiveCount are "Request a demo" | No trial printed |
| Bluebeam | Max tier: AI drawing review, drawing comparison, multi-view stitching, MCP link to Claude. Takeoff tools sit in Core and Complete and are not labeled AI | Basics $260, Core $330, Complete $440, Max $590 per user a year | 14-day trial of Max; the $590 is an introductory price locked through the 2027 renewal |
| Quotr.ai | AI symbol detection on Lite; AI area, symbol and wall detection on Plus; done-for-you at $0.25 a square foot | Lite $828 and Plus $2,999 per seat a year ($69 and $249.92 a month equivalent) | 7-day trial; no setup fee |
| eTakeoff Dimension | SnapAI point and line selection; Togal.AI auto-takeoff sold as an add-on | Advanced $795 and Premier $1,495 a year; Togal.ai add-on $1,800 a year on the order form | Togal add-on is non-refundable and auto-renews per the agreement on the page |
| Buildxact | AI takeoff assistant and estimate reviewer add-ons over a cost-database estimator with unlimited users | Foundation $199 a month ($169 annual); add-ons $99 and $149 a month. Read September 17, 2026; the site returned 403 on November 1 | Not re-read |
| Verdict | Kreo Pro at $175 a user is the entry point for plan-set AI with pricing attached. Togal at $299 is the auto-detect leader if you only need quantities. Trimble is the MEP pick with a stated sample behind its claims. Roofers skip this table. | ||
Three vendors print no price at all. Drawer AI, Countfire and McCormick all route to a sales form; McCormick's pricing link resolves to a 1,228-byte image. MeasureSquare's plan prices are filled in by a cart script that did not render in two reads, so the only MeasureSquare figures we can print are a $400 onboarding kit and $199 per person per day of training. Buildxact's site blocked us on November 1, so its row carries the September reading and the date.
Two of the printed prices moved since September. STACK's Takeoff & Estimate entry tier printed $249 per user when we read it on September 17 for the estimating software guide; today the page prints $299 for Premium and $349 for Pro, both billed annually on 12-month terms, with the monthly-payment figure hidden behind a toggle that did not render. Bluebeam added the Max tier at $590 with the AI features, above a Complete tier that still holds the actual quantity tools.
Which one, by the company you run
A remodeler or GC that prices from drawings every week and has one estimator pays $2,100 a year for Kreo Pro and gets auto-measure plus a cost database in one seat. That beats PlanSwift Core at $3,000 and Togal at $3,588 for the same person, and Kreo is the only one of the three that prices the quantities it counts. Togal earns its premium when the work is area-heavy and the plan sets are big: its "unlimited automated takeoffs" and plan-set chat are built for a flooring, painting or drywall estimator who lives in architectural sheets, and its trade list (doors and hardware, drywall, electrical, flooring, framing, glazing, painting, general contractors) says so. Neither lists roofing, HVAC or plumbing.
A mechanical or plumbing sub bidding plan-and-spec work has two real choices with printed prices. Trimble Estimation MEP Pro is $1,950 a year a user with Trade Service material pricing inside, and Trimble is the only vendor on this page that published a sample for its AI claims. Beam AI's self-serve tier is sold per trade from $8,000 a year and its done-for-you service from $25,000, which is a different budget and a different buyer; both are priced for a company whose bid volume is the constraint, not an owner with a Saturday problem. Electrical subs have Drawer AI, which reads panel schedules and routes branch circuits, with no price on the page and a 30-day refund.
A company that gets a plan set a few times a year does not need a seat. STACK's free tier gives one active project a month with up to 300 plan pages and 50 measurements, which covers a bathroom remodel or a small addition, and PlanSwift's 14-day Core trial runs the full Auto Takeoff with no card on file. The chatbot section below covers the rest of that job.
What the accuracy claims actually say
Every AI takeoff vendor prints a percentage, and almost none prints a method. Togal's homepage and FAQ say "98% accuracy on floor plans" and "5x faster." Its own blog post, last published October 30, 2026, says 97 percent, "three to ten seconds" per takeoff and "80% faster." The discrepancy is between two Togal pages, not between Togal and a critic, and neither page states a sample. Kreo publishes a comparison table for its Auto Measure 3.0 release: outline accuracy up from 72 to 94 percent, area captured from 92.6 to 99.3 percent, with no plan set, count or test date behind it. Drawer's "up to 90% less takeoff time" is attributed to customer reports. Quotr's own comparison post labels its 95 to 99 percent figure "internal benchmarking" and tells its readers to "confirm current before publishing," which is unusual candor and worth noting.
Beam AI prints "99%+ accurate," and the pricing FAQ attaches that figure to the Done For You service, where a human QA-checks every takeoff before it ships in 24 to 72 hours. The self-serve AI carries no separate accuracy number. That is the pattern to watch across the category: the highest percentage on the page is often the one with a person behind it.
US contractors in Trimble's first-half 2026 sample: 97% of drawing scales auto-set with no manual change, 60% less time counting objects, and "AI does not complete or finalize any part of the process."
Trimble's August 7, 2026 post by its director of product management is the one document on this page with a stated sample and period. Across more than 4,000 US contractors in the first half of 2026, the AI set an average of 300,000 drawing scales a month with 97 percent needing no manual change, saved about two hours per user a month on scale setting alone, counted an average of 460,000 objects a month at a 60 percent time saving against the three seconds a manual count takes, and cut a 60-minute estimate comparison to 10. It also says what the AI does not do: "Initial counting and classifying of symbols goes to an estimator for review," and each count carries a confidence rating. McCormick's January 2026 explainer, updated in June, draws the same line from the other side of the market: AI "cannot interpret ambiguous scope documents without human review," does not know that "a specific sub always runs 15% over on drywall," and when a drawing is unclear the good tools "flag it for your team to review." Buy on that basis and the percentages stop mattering.
Pricing faster only helps if the estimate requests keep coming
We build the website and the search program that fills the queue, then wire the request straight into whichever estimating tool you pick.
What Claude and ChatGPT can do with a plan set
The Google results for this keyword carry two videos by Tim Fairley, a former estimator: "How to Estimate a Construction Project with Claude AI," uploaded May 28, 2026 with 19,272 views, and "I Tested 50 Different Ways to Get AI to Read Drawings," uploaded October 26, 2026 with 16,913 views. Both descriptions sell a paid community and carry a takeoff-software affiliate link, so treat them as a demo, not a test. The documentation from the model vendors is the better source for what the chatbot will and will not do, and Anthropic's is specific.
Claude's help center, updated July 23, 2026, sets the chat limits at 500 MB per file, 20 files per chat, images up to 8,000 by 8,000 pixels, and PDFs up to 1,000 pages. The line that matters for a plan set is this one: Claude "analyzes both text and visual elements" in PDFs of 100 pages or fewer, and "for PDFs from 101 to 1000 pages, Claude processes text only." A 60-sheet residential set is read as drawings. A 300-sheet commercial set is read as the words on the sheets, which for a drawing is the title block and the notes. Split the set by discipline before you upload it. Project files, the persistent kind, are capped at 30 MB each and text only unless the PDF is multimodal.
Then the limitation Anthropic prints in its vision documentation: "Claude can give approximate counts of objects in an image but might not always be precisely accurate, especially with large numbers of small objects," and "Claude's coordinate and localization outputs are approximate." Receptacles on an E-sheet are small objects in large numbers. The docs close with "Do not use Claude for tasks requiring perfect precision or sensitive image analysis without human oversight." That is the dotted line on the chart. A chatbot will count, and it will be confidently off by some, and the estimator who signs the bid will not know which some.
What it does well is the paper around the drawings. Claude Pro is $17 a month on an annual plan or $20 billed monthly; ChatGPT Plus was $20 a month when we read OpenAI's pricing page on October 31 for the AI-first contractor post, and OpenAI's pages blocked us on November 1 so that date stands. For that money either one will read a 200-page spec book and list every section that touches your trade, pull the submittal and warranty requirements into a checklist, summarize the general conditions that change your labor assumptions, draft the RFI when sheet A-201 and the schedule disagree, and write the proposal letter from your own priced spreadsheet. It will also check the arithmetic in a takeoff you did by hand. OpenAI's developer documentation says its models receive both the text and a page image of each PDF page and recommends the "high" detail setting for "dense charts, small print, or diagrams," which is the same architecture Anthropic describes, so the ceiling is similar: good at reading, approximate at counting.
Bluebeam's new Max tier is the clearest sign of where the vendors think the chatbot belongs. At $590 a user a year it adds "AI integration via MCP," an AI drawing review that flags missing sheets and untagged fixtures, and AI drawing comparison, and the product page says it "will initially integrate with Anthropic/Claude." Bluebeam's quantity tools, Dynamic Fill and Quantity Link to Excel, stay in the $440 Complete tier with no AI label. The review is AI. The count is not. For a reader who wants the longer version of what a $20 assistant does for a trades office, our Claude for small business guide covers the setup.
Roofing is the exception: satellite, not plans
A residential roofer almost never prices from a plan set. The job arrives as an address, and the AI that saves the Saturday is the one that measures the roof from imagery before anyone climbs a ladder. That is a different product from everything above, and it is the one case where we sell the tool, so read the next paragraph with that in mind.
RoofMammoth is our instant roof estimator. A homeowner types an address into a widget on the roofer's website, the tool measures total roof area and primary pitch from satellite imagery, prints an instant estimate, and sends the lead with the roof data to the roofer's CRM by webhook. The pricing page on November 1, 2026 prints Starter at $48 a month for 50 estimates and two calculators with "Powered by RoofMammoth" branding, Growth at $90 a month for 500 estimates, ten calculators, five users, white label, CRM integration and hail event data, and an Enterprise tier on request. Both paid plans come with a 7-day trial with no card and no setup fee or contract. Growth includes five report credits a month for the deeper reports: a Precision Takeoff with facet-by-facet areas and eave, rake, hip, valley and ridge lengths is five credits, a 3D claim report with Xactimate export is ten, and extra credits run $35 for five up to $195 for thirty. We built it because the roofers we build websites for kept losing the lead in the 48 hours between the form and the in-person measure. If you buy a website from us the Growth plan is included; the roofing estimating software post ranks it against the alternatives with the same disclosure.
Roofr is the comparison most roofers make. When we read its pricing page on September 1 for the roofing CRM guide, measurement reports were $19 each on the free Starter tier and $13 on paid tiers from $249 a month, with the instant estimator sold as a $125 a month add-on. The Roofr number pays per roof; RoofMammoth's pays per month. A roofer running 40 instant estimates a month off the website is at $48 on one and $520 in reports on the other, and the math flips the other way for a shop that measures three roofs a month and does not want a widget. Beam AI also lists roofing on its done-for-you menu for a contractor bidding commercial roofs from plans, and that is the one roofing case where the plan-set tools above apply.
Three to skip
The first is a per-seat AI takeoff subscription for a company that sees a plan set a few times a year. Togal Growth is $3,588 a year per user billed up front, PlanSwift Core is $3,000, STACK Pro is $4,188, and every one of them is a 12-month term. At four plan sets a year that is $750 to $1,050 per set before anyone prices a line, and the free STACK tier plus a $20 chatbot covers the same four sets.
The second is buying the highest percentage on the page without asking which part of the product it describes. Beam's 99 percent belongs to its human-checked service. Togal prints two different figures on its own site. The question to ask on the demo is "what does the software do when it is not sure," and the vendors with a good answer, Trimble's confidence rating per count and McCormick's flag-for-review, are the ones to shortlist.
The third is letting the chatbot do the count. Anthropic's own documentation calls the counts approximate. Use Claude or ChatGPT for the spec, the scope letter, the RFI and the proposal, and use a takeoff tool or a person for the quantities. The one mistake a chatbot cannot make for you is the one on the bid form.
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Frequently asked questions
Can AI do a construction estimate?
AI does the counting and measuring step. Togal, Kreo, STACK, PlanSwift and Trimble all read a PDF plan set and produce quantities, and Togal's own FAQ says the estimator still reviews the takeoff and "makes the pricing calls." Trimble's 2026 results post states that "AI does not complete or finalize any part of the process." Pricing, labor and risk stay with a person on every tool we priced.
What is the best AI estimating software?
For a one-estimator shop that prices from drawings and wants the cost database in the same seat, Kreo Pro at $175 a user a month billed annually is the best-priced AI takeoff tool we found. For an MEP sub, Trimble Estimation MEP Pro at $1,950 a year a user has material pricing inside and the only published sample behind its AI claims. Togal at $299 a user a month is the auto-detect leader for area-heavy trades. For a residential roofer, satellite measurement from RoofMammoth or Roofr replaces all of them.
How much does AI takeoff software cost?
Per-seat plans with AI run $175 to $349 per user a month billed yearly (Kreo Pro $175, Kreo Business $250, Togal $299, STACK Premium $299, STACK Pro $349), or $1,950 to $3,000 a year a seat (Trimble Estimation MEP Pro, PlanSwift Essential and Core). Quotr Lite is $828 a seat a year. Beam AI sells annual licenses per trade from $8,000. Bluebeam's AI tier is $590 a user a year. All prices are the vendor pages on November 1, 2026.
Can ChatGPT or Claude read blueprints and do a takeoff?
They read them. Claude analyzes the images in a PDF of 100 pages or fewer and text only beyond that, and takes up to 20 files of 500 MB each per chat. Anthropic's documentation says Claude "can give approximate counts of objects in an image but might not always be precisely accurate, especially with large numbers of small objects." Use either model for the spec review, scope summary, RFIs and the proposal, and a takeoff tool or a person for the quantities.
How much does Togal AI cost?
Togal's pricing page on November 1, 2026 prints one self-serve plan, Growth, at $299 per user a month billed yearly, with unlimited automated takeoffs and plan-set chat, and a custom Business plan for four or more users. No trial length is printed; "Try Now" books a demo. eTakeoff resells Togal as an $1,800 a year add-on to its Dimension software.
Is there free AI estimating software?
STACK's free tier is permanent and includes one active project a month, up to 300 plan pages and 50 measurements, after a 7-day taste of Pro. PlanSwift gives 14 days of its Core plan, including Auto Takeoff, with no card. Bluebeam's 14-day trial runs the Max tier. Claude's free plan reads PDFs with a usage cap. None of the AI auto-count features are free past the trial.